Reading to Write
Posted in Books, Writing on 05/26/2011 05:15 am by adminSo, remember how I mailed all my boxes of books from Texas to Washington earlier this month?
I was so proud that I mailed the boxes as media mail and spent a lot (A LOT) less than I was expecting. As long as the box only contains books, cds, dvds — nothing that qualifies as first class mail — you get a special super cheap rate.
And as I’ve found out, your boxes may or may not actually arrive at their destination. Only 9 out of my 11 made it. My mom has received notices in the mail that one of the boxes ended up at the dead letter office in Dallas, one in Seattle. Somehow the paper with my address became separated from the box, and I didn’t put another paper with the address inside the box. (Do people actually do that? I guess I’ve proven that they should.) So these two sad boxes of books are sitting there, dead, unidentified, possibly lost forever.
The box in Dallas, I have no idea at this point which books are in it. The one in Seattle, I can remember a few. I’m hoping I remember enough of them to fill out a claim form — and I’m hoping that I wrote my name inside the flyleaf of a few of them as proof of identification.
One of the books I know is in the Seattle box is Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. When I first read it a few years back, it challenged me to savor the words, sentences, paragraphs I read. Read good writers as a form of study, as a way to hone my craft. Read to absorb what is lovely, what is powerful, what is effective about great writers’ use of the English language.
When I was working on difficult passages in my manuscript about Lydia, I would pick up the novel Sold by Patricia McCormick. Her subject matter is different from mine, but I’m inspired by her insight into the mind and heart of a young girl who left her village. She helps me know how to show, not tell, the choicest details.
Sometimes when I’m working on an essay, I’ll look at something by Donald Miller or Annie Dillard. Lately the poetry of Wendell Berry gets my creative wheels turning, even if I’m not working on poetry. Just mulling over the words, their sounds, their meanings helps me think more like I am truly a great writer myself.
Hopefully my books aren’t really dead, either in Dallas or Seattle.
Postscript: After writing this, I sorted through a few of the boxes in my living room and found Reading Like a Writer. Which is good news for that book — it’s not dead. But bad news for my memory — am I going to be able to list correctly any of the other books for the claim form?
